I know mine is an unpopular opinion but I was just astoundingly disappointed with this release. It's riddled with sloppy lyrics, unimaginative musicianship, (Except for a few amazing moments of progness) and there is even a few sloppy editing slip ups I heard. The very end of a Tempting Offer around 3:38. Read the lyrics and just hear how messed up that sounds. It's unexcusable and no other DT album would have allowed that sort of slip up to occur. Portnoy was half of the production team. Now it's all Petrucci and I feel it's Petrucci's fault for how this album sounded. It was all his idea, his lyrics, his music, all his. This should have been john Petrucci's The Astonishing.
I'm just confused when people call this a masterpiece. It doesn't match up to other epics of it's kind, it doesn't match up to DT's history of prog epis, it doesn't even compare to Prog epics that exist in the 2010's. It just falls so short of its goal that it doesn't even deserve its title. It was so hyped to be the epic to break all epics and it wasn't! By the time I get to Act of Faythe I just started crying by how boring the music And lyrics were. Petrucci put the story first above everything, and if the listener won't care about the story, then the music suffers for it. When music is first like let's say any other Dream Theater album, the lyrics could be Meh but it still had the music to fall on. Not in this album. It's just so broken. This is the Sonic Boom/ Phantom Menace of Dream Theater albums. Sorry guys.
I am a huge DT/Prog/Music fan which is why I feel so strongly about my hatred for this album.
You don't have to be sorry. It's nice to have differing opinions, but I don't think you get what the album is at all.
It was never meant to be the prog epic to end prog epics (and I don't really know what a 2010-prog epic really is
). The Astonishing basically a musical, and if you aren't in that headspace you aren't probably gonna enjoy it. Yeah, the lyrics can be kinda silly at times, but Dream Theater has been writing less-than-stellar lyrics for over a decade now, and that hasn't made the band's music less enjoyable (LET ME INTRODUCEEEE MY BROTHA! A BITTER GENTLEMAN, HISTORIAN! Never Enough?).
You kinda blame John Petrucci for your hatred of the album, and that's silly. Even though the concept was originally JP's, this is as much a Dream Theater album as A Dramatic Turn of Events was (which is commonly regarded as one of DT's best post-2005 albums). JP and JR got credited fully as the writers for the first time, but that doesn't mean the writing/recording dynamic was different than what we had in, for example, Dream Theater. Some people (me included) consider this a masterpiece because of what it represents as a musical evolution of the band, and the effort of creating something so ambitious that got away so much from the traditional DT sound without losing its edge. For the first time ever, DT chose melody over technicality and overblown progressiveness, and that's something that I will always cherish. This album is basically full of beautiful themes that get stuck in my head for days, which is something I enjoy a lot in music. I'd rather have an incredible and memorable theme or melody over an overblown Dance of Eternity-15/16 time signature bonanza, but that's just me. I'm a more theme-oriented guy, which is probably why I liked this album so much.
Once again, you don't have to like it. It's nice to discuss differing opinions, but you calling it utter garbage and hoping some people will agree with you isn't gonna take you anywhere lol.